Valedictory
by Threesmallcrows
Summary: At the end of the school year, Satsuki deliberates on the valedictory address, and everything else.


Valedictory

"…the various aims of this address are to inspire the graduates and to thank individuals responsible for their successes while reflecting on youthful frivolity and the accomplishments of the class. Above all, however, the primary aim of the valedictory address is to allow a representative of the graduating class to bid a final farewell to the students and to the school, as the graduates prepare to disperse and to begin the next phase of their lives…"

()

It is, of course, Matoi (Ryuko, now, she supposes, but the name still lies odd on her tongue, and in her head it will probably be Matoi for a long, long time) who has the impudence to bring it up.

"So what the hell are you gonna say?"

They're standing together on the roof—well, Satsuki is standing: back straight, shoulders squared, uniform crisp, and weight distributed within two grams worth of perfectly even between her heels. Meanwhile, Matoi's sprawled out in that typically sloppy way of hers. How Satsuki itches to crease and iron her limbs, drag a comb through that mop of hair, rearrange her spine along a ruler's edge and press her knees together… For God's sake, anyone standing in the courtyard right now would barely have to look up to get quite a view.

Although she supposes they're both beyond modesty by now.

Matoi tilts her head backwards, glancing at her upside-down.

"Satsuki?"

She shakes her head, very slightly, and is once again startled not to find snakes of black whipping around her waist. Her head is light as a dandelion without its glorious, solemn mane. She feels—unsteady.

"I don't know."

()

She sits in her egg-shaped throne (_chair_, she reminds herself sternly—there is no more need for a Queen). One perfectly manicured nail tapping against its side.

Really, this is ridiculous. She's given the valedictory address every year since she entered Honnouji—as if any student, senior or not, could possibly be more qualified than herself. She's been delivering speeches since her first show-and-tell in kindergarten (others brought their plastic robot toys and dolls and crayon drawings; she had opted for the Bakuzan, practically as tall as she, back then).

_Just make it up and be done with it. Stop quibbling like a child._

Unbidden, the question springs up like a flyaway hair: _it's really happening, isn't it? In two weeks, it'll all be over…_

Her sigh is loud. Or, rather, the room is silent. Her Elite Four are all gone from its gloom. Sanageyama is no doubt off enjoying either his regained eyesight or one or the other of his club captains. As for the other three—

She doesn't know which is more surprising, Nonon and Inumuta, or Gamagori and his tiny no-star girl, barely the size of a child.

How is it, she wonders, that they've all found the time to fall in love? She has only ever had eyes for the war, the campaign and the battlefield and the long, resentful trek down the road of vengeance. And now—

Truth be told, the time weighs heavy on her. Her underlings have scattered into the fullness of their own lives. Her parents are dead. Her sister is still wary of her.

Satsuki's lips remain pressed together in silence, but in her chest, her heart screams for blood. Where is the next fight? Where are the enemies? She twists in a radiant room, hiding from the sun beneath her arms, looking desperately for shadows to battle.

Truth be told?

Truth be told, for the first time in her life, she is afraid.

"Pathetic," she murmurs, and drains her cup. These days, it seems the only thing in her life bitter enough to satisfy her is Soroi's tea.

That, at least, has not changed.

()

Without the bracingly military grip of an imminent battle, Satsuki's meetings with her Elite Four are—well, a little awkward.

It's not like they can just start—hanging out, or whatever it is teenagers are supposed to do. The _–sama _is not so easy to drop.

Still, ten days from graduation, they sit in the old war room (Satsuki, as always, a little apart and above the rest) and talk about the future. Surprisingly, none of them but Gamagori is entering the military. Sanageyama spouts ill-considered and slightly sketchy plans to "travel" and "see the world". Their resident hacker is entering a top technical university—despite his utter lack of qualifying exams, the admissions board had rapidly reconsidered Inumuta's rejection after he'd broken into their mainframe and threatened to delete _all _the students' records. Gamagori will bid farewell to the land in July, when he sets sail with those infamous fellow ultra-disciplinarians, the Marine Corps. And Nonon is travelling to a conservatory in France, where Satsuki has no doubt she will study French music, alcohol, and love-making to the utmost of her ability, and return even farther out of Inumuta's league than she already is.

Nonon is the one to breach the gap. "Sooo, Satsuki-sama," she trills, pressing a puffed sleeve against Satsuki's side. "You gonna stick around Honnouji?"

"You kidding me?" drawls Sanageyama. "Without Satsuki-sama here, this place'd go to shit faster than Mankanshoku can jump Gamagori's bones."

"_Sanageyama!" _bellows Gamagori.

"She is quite speedy," observes Inumuta quietly.

Nonon glances sideways at Satsuki, and says, "Shut the fuck up, Monkey."

Sanageyama pales. "I didn't mean it like _that._ I just—"

"Monkeys can just never learn to watch their mouths, huh?"

"Oh, go fuck yourself—"

"No, he's right," says Satsuki, and the bickering falls abruptly away. Sometimes, she kind of wishes they didn't listen to her as much. When everyone treats every one of your words like a pearl, you find yourself turning into a conversational miser, capable of vocalizing only in polished facets and brilliant cuts, penny-pinching thoughtless remarks before they ever hit the air.

"The board is missing a director," she says slowly. Even the thought of Ragyo's spider-like voice brings disgust, heavy as vomit, to the back of Satsuki's throat. She pinches that penny, throws it back down into the vault of her. "And there is no one more fit than me to fill the position."

After everyone has left, Nonon lingers at her side. After all these years, she is still the only one who can bear the sharpness of Satsuki's silence without a flinch. Satsuki supposes she will never tell her how grateful she is for that. Yet another rainy day fund, waiting cool and unspent and ultimately meaningless.

They watch the sun fall without a word. As the orange begins to bleach from the sky, like blood wrung clean from cloth, Satsuki says, "I suppose—that you all are leaving me behind."

Nonon makes a faint sound.

"You'll always be ahead of us. Always. And we'll never stop following you."

"There is no need for you to continue to—"

"You don't—" Satsuki hears Nonon suck in a breath as she inadvertently interrupts her, before forging bravely ahead. "It's not about the war. This…"

She gestures at Honnouji and the town, its massive dark hide like a slumbering beast's, beginning to alight with pinpricks of firefly light. "It's home. And you're our leader. Peacetime, wartime, or whatever—nothing will ever change that. You know?"

Satsuki nods. She wonders, if this were another life, whether Nonon would now put her arm around her shoulders or her waist, the way she has seen no-star girls do in town. She and Nonon, she knows, will never be no-star girls, even in a world without stars. They have been scarred by them, irrevocably.

She glances through her bangs at the night sky, at those distant, furious orbs, raging blindly at nothing millennia away.

"I know."

()

The weekend before the ceremony, Satsuki puts on her biggest, most ridiculous pair of sunglasses, tucks her hair into a straw boating hat, and sneaks into town like a fugitive.

She doesn't know what the hell she's hoping to accomplish. That damned speech still needs to be written.

Probably, she's just sick of sitting in the gloom in her throne-not-throne, surrounded by the scraping noises of her school being reconstructed. It makes her feel musty, and old, and Ragyo-like.

But she doesn't feel the slightest bit more at ease in the city. _Her _city—why the hell should she feel like a stranger? She owns the damn place!

Well, on the dusty reams of the Kiryuin legal documents, she does. In reality, as she traverses for the first time _her _dirty cobbled streets, skirting _her _piles of trash and unswept sidewalks and broken sewage pipes leaking filth, she realizes that to that group of middle-school brats skulking at the corner sneaking cigarettes, or to that kid absorbed in his plastic electronic gadget, or that old woman tossing water out her second-floor apartment window, Satsuki Kiryuin is nothing but a concept. A face on a poster, a slogan on a wall—_fear is freedom, subjugation is liberation, contradiction is truth. _Those, the facts of the world? Rather: Kiryuin the paper doll, Kiryuin the silly girl, shouting into the wind. The facts of the world are and always have been laughter, and tears, and joy, and farewells and reunions and heartbreak, and failure, yes failure to which she is so deadly-allergic, and the humble triumph, the scraped knees and scraped hearts, and above all, the love to which her commanders, her fearless, iron-teethed, wolf-eyed commanders, have so readily surrendered, so quickly laid down their weapons for, and knelt, when she knows they would die before kneeling.

It isn't fair. Slogans are all she has ever known, and she _is _a paper doll, she is a girl, but how to stop? How to kneel and how to grow? Ragyo has ruined her, crippled her since birth, and she will never know the joy of a wedding dress because she wore hers too young. And the sword at her side like a tumor, and a mind that spins in steel circles, refusing to rest. Yes, the great, the triumphant Kiryuin-daughter, knee-deep now in self-pity and self-doubt, purposeless, lost, lost, lost…

"Ah—it's Satsuki-sama!"

She starts, fingers unclenching from arms (and is that _sweat, _she thinks near-hysterically, foreign as tears on her palms? It's so damned hot, outside the air-conditioned realms of her castle).

She cannot at all place the bobble-headed girl whirling towards her, until a massive hulk of a shadow falls over her, a blissfully familiar cool.

"Gamagori. Mankanshoku," she says, and hopes to God they cannot hear the thinness of her voice, like ice about to crack.

"She knows my name!" shrieks Mankanshoku, throwing both her arms around Gamagori's massive bicep. "Ira-chan, did you hear that? She knows—"

"Everyone within a block heard!" blusters Gamagori, bright red. "And I _told _you not to call me that."

"What, Ira-chan?"

"See, that—"

"But it sounds so cute!"

Satsuki allows herself the faintest of smiles—testing it, like a child cautiously stroking a wild animal. Poor Gamagori, caught between the woman who is most important in his life, and the one who was. The commander and the lover, the surrenderer, struggling visibly in his knit brows and flushed skin. She knows which she hopes will win. "On a date?" she asks coolly.

"Yes!" chirps Mankanshoku before Gamagori can say anything to the contrary. "Today's been just _amazing! _We went to the aquarium—which one was it, again?"

"Honno Bay Aquarium," he mumbles.

"—exactly, and there were so many fish, and there was this one bat-thing that we got to touch, and they were kind of slimy but it's okay. And we saw the sharks get fed, oh, and Ira-chan bought me one—hold on, let me—" Mankanshoku wrestles a ridiculous plush great-white that's approximately the size of her torso out of a bag and presses it into Satsuki's arms. It's as furry as a rabbit and looks about as threatening, with its grubby felt teeth and myopic beady eyes. "Isn't it the cutest thing you've ever seen? It's—_so—_fat!"

Has she ever owned a stuffed animal in her life? Satsuki doubts it. She squeezes the shark experimentally. It _is_ atrociously obese. Any real animal shaped like this would have died off centuries ago.

"It is. Cute," she agrees rigidly, and hands the illogical thing back to Mankanshoku before she suffocates in its fluff.

After Mankanshoku stuffs it (somehow) back into her backpack, they all shuffle awkwardly for a second. Satsuki is about to make some excuse and slink off when Mankanshoku suddenly darts forward and bops her in the nose.

Satsuki blinks.

A second later it becomes apparent that she was aiming for Satsuki's sunglasses and, due to their height difference, had missed. She succeeds in nabbing them the second time.

"Mako—" says Gamagori warningly.

"You look really nice," says Mako haltingly. "Um. Very cute."

"… thank you." Not magnificent, brilliant, glorious, not even beautiful. Cute, the way the overweight shark is cute. She feels laughter clogging her throat. Is this what she wanted to hear?

"But you shouldn't hide your face. Oh, wait—do you get sunburned easily? 'Cause if you do I have sunscreen. Do you want—"

"Mako," says Gamagori, "she doesn't need sunscreen."

"How do _you _know that? Guys don't know the first thing about skincare." She looks imploringly at Satsuki. "Am I right, or what? Ira could probably sit in the sun all day and he wouldn't even get red. But Satsuki-sa… er, has one of those milk-of-cream—or, wait, cream-of—anyway, she's got a delicate-looking complexion—but I mean, like no way I'm calling Satsuki-sama weak or anything like that—"

Satsuki does smile, this time, wryly. Silently, she holds her hand out for the sunglasses.

()

"Might I ask what Lady Satsuki is planning next?"

Satsuki watches Soroi's ancient fingers, weathered as sea-beaten pine wood. What a fine contrast, against the porcelain cheek of the china, eternally-smooth.

"I'm going to join the board. Someone has to oversee this bunch of pigs."

"Ah."

Her eyebrow ticks up. "What?"

The tea spills into her cup, perfectly on beat. The sepia of old photographs; is the amber of it particularly luminescent today, like those droplets in museums, the coffins of Jurassic mosquitoes?

She _is _getting nostalgic.

"What is it?" she repeats.

"I had thought Satsuki-sama might be considering going away."

Her heart thunders.

"…going away?" she repeats faintly. "What do you mean?"

"To school. University."

"University?" She's parroting him like an idiot, but she can't seem to stop herself. "Then who would run Honnouji?"

"The rest of the board. Or the next Student Council. Perhaps it's time to hold elections."

She twists abruptly in her seat to look at him. In the dark, he looks like a half-solidifed column of smoke, just a pale face hovering in the air like the wise old spirit from every fairy tale. She has a sudden vision of herself stepping into a brightly-lit train station, luggage in hand, and turning to see Soroi melt into air behind her. "Are you making fun of me?"

"I would never, Satsuki-sama." His voice is grave. After a moment, he says, "If I have displeased you, please forget I ever spoke."

"No, I… just…"

He waits, exquisitely tactful, for her words to coalesce, just as he has waited for her all her life.

When they stumble, and fail, he bows and walks away.

()

Even as the physical order of her school is gradually restored, its social constructs are crumbling slowly, majestically downwards.

It's not just Gamagori and Mako, although they're one of the more extreme cases. In their post-star apocalypse of a world, people are hooking up like there's no tomorrow. It's Fukuroda slipping into the locker rooms with a one-star, or Sanageyama chasing the tennis captain's short two-star skirts—not to mention Inumuta and Nonon, who seem to have developed a burgeoning appetite for doing it in public spaces. All this sex, and even some love. How had she held them all apart for so long? It seemed so effortless at the time.

Late Wednesday afternoon, Satsuki is about to slide open the door to a classroom when a broad hand and the overpowering scent of cologne stops her.

"You'd better not." His voice is halfway between old-man huskiness and the smooth voice of a Nudist Beach operator. "I'm pretty sure I saw your pink-haired girlfriend and her boy toy slip in there a few minutes ago. _With _the sewing-club president."

"Keeping an eye on your students? What a filthy pervert."

"I won't deny I'm a voyeur."

"You're enjoying all this."

"Certainly. Honnouji's having quite a springtime. It makes me feel young again."

She turns fully to face him. Typically, he's standing way too close. "Ryuko's not here."

"I can see that."

Could this ass be making a move on her?

"And how are you, Miss Satsuki? Enjoying the close of the school year as well?"

His body heat crowds her. Somehow, the first four buttons of his shirt have come undone. She scoffs. "Don't bother, _sensei. _There's laws against that, or didn't you read the teacher contract?"

"Funny you bring it up. As pretty as you are, I've come to say goodbye, not hello. I'm handing in my resignation."

"Becoming a full-time Nudist, I suppose."

"What? Oh, no. That's over, now that REVOCS is gone. Although you can go ahead and tell Ryuko that for her, I'd be willing to make a one-man comeback—"

It shakes her, how easily he says it. _Oh, no—that's over now._ "So what are you going to do now?"

He shrugs, extravagantly casual. "I dunno. Not teach, that's for sure! I'll figure out something. There's plenty of pretty girls in the world, for one. On to the next stage, and all that."

She nods, stiffly. For a moment, she'd caught a glimpse into his easy-breezy world, a tropical-lit orb of club lights and salted air and the swaying of palm trees against cerulean sky, and been—jealous. "Well, then."

His laughter is soft. "I won't expect you to thank me for my service." He bows, and before she can stop him, takes her right hand in his and kisses the ridge of her knuckles. "Goodbye, Miss Satsuki. It's been a hell of a semester. Give your sister my love."

In a moment, her hand is swinging loosely through the air, empty again. The hallway is abandoned. From inside the room, she hears Nonon laughing, muffled through the wall, and the murmur of one of the boys' voices. There are three days left until the end of the semester.

She walks the other way down the hall, heels clacking loudly in the near-silence.

()

Ragyo has no grave. But, in the reconstruction of Honnouji, Satsuki ensures that there is a small, barren slab of concrete at the back of the school, into which the reunited scissor blades are plunged. No honor—just a reminder. And a place to pace on sleepless nights.

This is not the first time she has dreamed about it. There's not even the decency of a plot, this time. Just pale, spidery hands, and a voice slithering under her door like a monster. She wakes on sheets damp with sweat, and snarls, squashing the trembling of her traitorous lip down between her teeth.

Throwing the blankets aside, she looks at herself in the mirror. Hers is the body of a soldier. A weapon. Finely honed as any blade. Made to be used; masterless now. Yet she cannot force it to relax, any more than a sword can lie down and let loose its sharpness, or a missile close its eyes and sleep. All she can do is wait.

Waiting is a game that Satsuki plays well. But there will be no winning against Ragyo this time. It's at moments like these when her mind seethes until she sees sparks of white fly like dust before her eyes, her heart beating and beating and beating out an ocean of adrenaline until she might drown in it.

She gets up and paces the abandoned school like a caged lion, up and down the endless stairs. This school, at least, understands her. Mother thought them her fortresses; no longer.

The thought falls upon her like an ambush. She stops. Has she—no, she doesn't think so. If she recalls correctly, she moved in the week after she graduated middle school. Up until the events of the last month, she hadn't stepped foot out of the place.

Almost five years, she calculates mechanically.

She thinks about the laws of physics (what little formulation her overlarge mind casually absorbed over the years, particles of dust that managed to escape her blood-tinted filter, because what physics had she needed to know, other than the angle of the strain and tear of muscle, and gravity the obstacle to speed, and the escape velocity of steel through skin to flesh?), about inertia. _A power of resisting by which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavors to preserve its present state_. That definition has a certain sweetness. She has known a decade of resistance; yes, it even might be said _as much as in her lies. _Perhaps Newton would council her that it is natural, that slowing down will take some time, let alone changing her path. That the burning of her mind now is just necessary friction.

Ah, but Newton had also insisted it took the interference of an external force to change, and this is a concept that does not lie so easily with her.

She will have to be her own external force. Of course; as always. Satsuki makes her way out to the moonscape of the courtyard. Honnouji does not feel half so large as it used to; its highest peak not farther than the tips of her own fingers. With familiarity…

What would you like to do?

She likes the battle. She likes making war, and her Bakuzan, and Junketsu.

She frowns, tries again.

What do you want?

The answer coalesces gradually. To be with. To be with people? To talk—not order, not speechify, just talk. Yes. To have friends. To take long baths, and long walks. To go to the beach. The floodgate is open now. To go shopping for clothes—normal clothes, no wedding dresses, no battle uniforms. To read books, and study, and learn. To try again for the childhood she cast aside so casually.

_I had thought Satsuki-sama might be considering going away._

University. Soroi had been the one to suggest it.

But _University _is not _here, _is not Honnouji, not five years not home not—

What if she considers it a mission? Go to University. She mouths the words, testing them on her tongue.

Not quite Ragyo, is it? Not quite REVOCS and revolution and the world.

_Not good enough, Satsuki-chan. Get up. It hurts? You're scared? Get up. Fight. One more time. Good girl. Not good enough. Fight._

The taint of her erstwhile mother is particularly persistent tonight. How irritating. She finds herself drawn towards the back of the school, slipping down back corridors towards the scissors.

There is someone already there. Bedhead like a wild weed and bare feet, contemplating the scissors like a lover with her hands on her hips.

She seems to recognize the sound of Satsuki's footsteps, and begins speaking without turning: "You know, Mako came to talk to me about you the other night. She said she ran into you in town. 'Ryuko-chan, you have to go talk to her. She looked like she was gonna cry!' That's what she said to me. I told her, bullshit. That heartless bitch hasn't got a single tear in her body." Matoi glances sideways at her through her bangs, almost shy-looking.

"If you wanted to get your mouth washed out, you needn't have come all the way up here to do it."

"I couldn't sleep." She scratches the back of one ankle with another. "It's the same with you, right?" When Satsuki doesn't respond, she says haltingly, "It was Senketsu, this time. I'd left him in the house, and for some reason it caught on fire. I was searching through all the rooms, but I couldn't find him anywhere. I just kept running and running, and he kept calling out to me…"

Satsuki nods, curt, and because she feels like she has to offer something in returns, says, "Mine was Ragyo."

Matoi spits. "That bitch." She touches the handle of her weapon lightly. "So? What the hell's eating you?"

Matoi's not the same as her, Satsuki realizes. This fight was thrust upon her, and although she rose magnificently enough to the occasion, there's no reason to suspect she's anything but relieved to return to an ordinary existence. She feels mildly disappointed by this.

She'd thought that she might—understand.

"Come on, say something already. If you keep staring like that you're gonna burn a hole through my scissor. You've had that constipated look on your face since like last week. It's creeping me out."

She opens her mouth, and nothing comes out. There is a nearly physical presence holding her tongue back. To say anything now would be weakness. She struggles. She wants to say this. She needs to, before the moment passes and she finds herself awakening once more atop Honnouji, alone in an empty house and aching for yesterday's war and surrounded by peacetime children who read of REVOCS in the history book blank-eyed before laughing and turning to their lunchtime play.

"I… was thinking… I might go to university."

It is a gargantuan effort; her heartbeat is literally elevated by the end of the sentence.

Matoi stares at her, before breaking into a grin.

"What the hell, Kiryuin! _I might go to university? _That's all?"

Satsuki flinches, some revolting combination of confused and insulted and humiliated.

"Are you laughing at m—"

"Of course I'm laughing at you, you idiot. What the hell kind of dilemma is that? If you want to go, go. If you don't, then stay here. You don't have to take everything so seriously, you know. Sometimes it's really that simple."

"…Yeah, well, excuse me for not being able to think about things the 'simple way.' I'm used to something rather different."

"Yeah, yeah, miss smartass General-pants. Get off your damn pedestal and come celebrate with us commoners already. In case you haven't heard, the war is over."

"You're a fighter. Tell me, sister. Who do we fight now?"

Ryuko snorts. "Are you seriously telling me you're gonna have trouble picking fights? I give you an hour, tops, in college before you piss some upperclassmen the hell off with your pretentious bullshit and get your ass handed to you."

"…You mean, hand someone their ass."

"Are we taking bets?"

"You'd lose, Matoi. Every time."

"Bitch."

"Delinquent. Endeavour not to ruin this school in my absence."

"Like hell I won't."

"I'll ensure it."

"Hey, none of that coming-home bullshit. I don't want to see your ass around Hono until at least winter break, you hear me? If you're homesick, you can just suck it up and cry in your dorm room. Like a plebeian."

"Tough words—for a _plebeian_. You know you'll miss me."

Matoi throws her arms around her, suddenly. Satsuki stiffens instinctively. The last person to get so close to her was that woman. For a moment, her body crawls with invisible insect legs, and the muscles in her body cramp with the electric desire to punch, kick, escape.

It's the smell, oddly, that brings her back down. Matoi—Ryuko—smells faintly of sweat, and soap, and the irony tang of blood. Their mother was always cloying florals and vanilla and sweets shoved down your throat till you choked. These arms do not clench, do not bind, and the nails against her back are not curved talons but the blunt, chewed-short ones of her irresponsible little sister. _Ragyo is dead, _Satsuki thinks abruptly—realizes_, _all over again, as if it hasn't been weeks since the that monster tore her own heart out. _She is gone. Like Ryuko said, the war is won. _

And just behind that, like a slipstream—I am free.

"Of course I will," Ryuko mutters into the side of her neck. "We're all gonna fucking miss you, you tyrant."

Gingerly, Satsuki raises her arms. Settles them lightly on her sister's warm back.

()

She slips in just as the sky is threatening sunrise. Her footsteps are silent, her heels slung in one hand, because Soroi has always been altogether too light a sleeper.

He doesn't appear to be up, but in the cavernous Kiryuin bathroom, a freshly drawn bath waits, steaming slightly in the predawn dark.

When he serves her breakfast, she says, "I kept you up again."

"It was no trouble at all, Satsuki-sama."

She smiles. "I've always been trouble. But—"

"Yes?"

She stills him mid-pour. Her hands, blistered as they are by the grip of her sword, feel girlish against his skin.

"Is it too late to apply to university, do you think?"

()

The graduation takes place that afternoon. Satsuki has slept maybe two hours since the last day, but she doesn't feel tired. Rather, the opposite; her body buzzes with adrenaline, and the colours of the school seem ultra-vivid to her heightened heart. She's not just graduating another class, this time. She's graduating herself.

She gazes out into the stadium stands. Ring upon ring of parents, siblings, assorted aunts and uncles and cousins and bits of family, most of whom have never set foot in Honnouji before, turning and staring and gaping so many colored pixels in a shifting screen. The ceremony hasn't even started yet and the camera flashes are going off like bursts of gunshots. Each eye seeking their loved one as surely as an arrow; a volley of affection, an attack which only heals.

She is standing at the head of the students, so she cannot see them, but she knows the sight of the gathered force of the senior class of Honnouji Academy is an impressive one. Iori had come close to killing himself sewing this many new uniforms—Inumuta reported having to deliver him soup in the laboratories, once, after he'd collapsed after a twenty-hour directing shift. As expected, they're pristine, aesthetic, and perfectly-fitted—not to mention prominently star-less. For the first time in academy history, graduation will not proceed according to rank; proud Honnouji will revert to the plebeian alphabetical. Still, no one had complained when it was announced that those who had led in the war against REVOCS (mainly three-stars, but then again, there were a smattering of others) be the year's salutatorians. So it is that her Elite Four still flank her in the old, familiar pattern. She can hear Sanageyama yawning, loudly, and then a faint yelp—probably Nonon elbowing him in the ribs.

As she waits for the clock to hit five, she amuses herself looking for Ryuko. It's a futile endeavor, really, but it calms her somewhat to know that that little flag of red hair is wagging rudely away somewhere out there. Another few minutes, perhaps. She knows because, with the way the academy is situated, at five the sun will have moved just so that the stadium seats are bathed in cool dark, and the podium where she stands set afire with the uniquely viscous light of a seaside sunset.

She never had ended up writing down a speech. She doesn't feel like she needs to, anymore. The anxiety has left her, pinned like an extra shadow beneath the blade in yesterday's moonlight. In the end, this speech will probably leave only the slightest of imprints in the sand of her memories, soon to be washed away in the general tide of all the other speeches of her past. But it doesn't matter, because the proof of it will be there in her, in her last glance at Honnouji and her first glimpse of her university's gates. The proof that she moves, that she lives.

The shadow engulfs the head of the last parent. She steps up to the podium. And she _does _relish it, the click of heel-to-toe, as crisp as the turn of a revolver's barrel—

A wolf-whistle or five cuts right across her.

There. All the way up in the nosebleediest of nosebleed seats. People all around them turning to look, a ripple in reverse.

"_HOTTIE!_" bellows a voice that Satsuki has gotten rather used to hearing yelling at her from across great distances, as another, much higher one squeals, "_WE LOVE YOU, SATSUKI-SAMA!_" followed by the general cacophony of a rowdy family and—yes, the idiotic barking of a dog.

Biting the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing, she raises one hand slightly, the biggest concession to a wave she's willing to make. The family quiets down abruptly, probably giggling to itself in thrilled embarrassment as murmurs rise and flatten over the crowd.

What a bunch of fools.

"Students of Honnouji," she begins.

(Epilogue)

Her train leaves late on a Sunday night. She has absolutely forbidden anyone she knows from even thinking about coming to the station. God forbid Kiryuin Satsuki leave her city any other way than she came into it, with a stone-cold glare and the dignity of an eagle.

As the sun sets, she lifts her luggage into the tram car and begins the long, rattling descent into the town. She watches the walls around her change from pale marble to rusty iron, spit-stained bricks and sheet-metal roofs, crinkly as potato chips. Here and there, neon is beginning to flutter awake; her city preens and waits for the night. In her head she counts off the layers—this is the sector Nonon lives in, this is Sanageyama's, and _this, _the dry, dusty brown at the bottom of the pan, is where Mankanshoku and her sister will sleep tonight.

Where are they now? And will they think of her?

Feeling slightly light-headed, she makes her way through the station, bursting at its seams with tired-looking businesspeople scurrying back to their suburbs. The maze of fluorescent-lit tunnels, with their dirty ads and fading signs, all look the same, and she cannot hear her footsteps in the din of the commute. For an instant or two, she feels as if she is floating, treading water in a deep pool, moving nowhere. But eventually she bursts out into cool air. The strip of sky above her is a deep murky brown, stained by the city's lights, but still some stars manage to struggle through the muck, twinkling persistently in the abyss. Satsuki breathes deeply, closing her eyes. It's less crowded here, thank God. The first thing she'll have to do when she gets to the university is wash her clothes.

Then, she senses it. Her eyes snap back open, darting around the ill-lit platform. Someone—someone is watching her. The nape of her neck clenches like a fist. She takes a half-step forwards, listening.

There. At the very end of the platform, just behind the archway leading back into the station—huddled breaths, ill-concealed presence. She strides forward quickly, luggage heavy and ready in her fist.

"You, in the shadows—come out and face me!"

There is a great heaving movement, a very many limbs recoiling in the dark. Satsuki pitches her bag forwards and feels it make satisfying contact.

"_Ouch!_"

"Fuck!"

A colorful mass tumbles out onto the floor.

"Well, shit," a girl's voice drawls. "I told you guys this wouldn't work."

Ryuko picks herself out of the tangle of bodies and faces—faces, yes, she sees Inumuta, and Gamagori, and Sanageyama and Nonon and Mankanshoku, and even Soroi, looking rather worse for wear, crushed as he is beneath one of Gamagori's massive legs.

"Yeah, maybe if you hadn't been so loud—" complains Nonon.

"_Loud? _I wasn't the one busy vacuuming _somebody's _face off. What the hell is that technique called, anyway? Lamprey?"

"_Nani sore? _You wanna go?"

"Jakazure," says Inumuta, long-suffering, "if you're going to fight her, could you at least get off me first, thanks."

"Oh, you didn't seem like you were complaining about it earlier—"

"Shut up, Matoi."

"Ira-chan, are you okay? Oh, wow, that's a real shiner. She got you right in the face. Is your nose bleeding? Ryuko-chan, do you have a handkerchief?"

"Use your uniform or something—"

"No, gross! That's unsanitary. Gosh, that's a lot of blood."

"Immmb—all right—"

"No-no-no, tilt her your head up—hold your arm in the air, that'll slow it down—"

Nonon clicks her tongue, flouncing heavily out of Inumuta's lap. "Geez, what a mess."

Bewildered, Satsuki glances between her and Ryuko.

"I told you not to come."

"Whatever," laughs Ryuko. "You can't order us around anymore, _Lady _Satsuki."

She looks at Nonon, who flushes and glances at the floor. "It was all your stupid sister's idea."

"Bullshit. We all wanted to do it."

Having successfully plugged Gamagori's nose with what looks to be a torn-off strip of her left stocking, Mankanshoku turns towards Satsuki with alarmingly shiny eyes. She sniffles loudly.

"I—c-can't believe you're really—"

In seconds she's bawling all over the place, first on Gamagori, then on Ryuko, then on a supremely disgusted-looking Nonon, who tolerates her tears for about two seconds before shoving her towards Satsuki.

She stops just shy of touching her, swaying and hiccupping violently.

"S-s-Satsuki-s-sama…"

People on the platform are staring at them. This kind of public scene is exactly what Satsuki was hoping to avoid. The commotion, the fuss and the mess_. _All she's ever wanted from life is a clean cut and a swift goodbye.

_Oh, fuck it._

She opens her arms slightly, and Mankanshoku barrels into her with the force of a small hurricane. And now her shirt, her white dress shirt so pristine in her sterile closet just this morning, already dusty and grimy from the tram ride, is wet, on top of everything else, with tears and saliva and probably some snot, with the way Mankanshoku is carrying on. And Ryuko and Gamagori are both starting to look suspiciously bright-eyed, and Nonon is scoffing loudly and turning away, her hands rising to her cheeks as Inumuta chuckles and puts his arm around her shoulder, and Sanageyama is loudly scolding all of them behind the safety of his sunglasses, and Soroi—

Soroi is standing shakily, leaning on Gamagori, and he looks her straight in the eye and bows deeply.

"Hail," he says quietly.

Gamagori—and yup, he's definitely going full-stream now, and Satsuki is laughing because he and his girlfriend cry in the exact same way, don't they?—straightens, and bellows, "Attention!"

The calm female voice of the PA system continues his sentence for him: "Attention. Bullet train 275 now arriving."

One-by-one, they straighten themselves, this little rag-tag group of warriors, each and every one of them their own mess.

"Lady Kiryuin Satsuki, the best Student Council President that Honnouji Academy has and ever will know, is standing before you!"

Surprise ruffles through the sparse crowd like a strong breeze: _Kiryuin _Satsuki? That's Satsuki-sama? It's her. It's really her! Light rakes across the platform as the train pulls in, picking out a sea of surprised faces, craning towards her like flowers towards the light.

"_SALUTE_!" Gamagori yells for the last time.

They bow, and tears scatter like crystal across the floor—except for Ryuko, her own impudent little sister, who stands and cries and smiles, unbowed and unbroken.

"Give them hell," she says, voice rough.

Satsuki smiles.

"Thank you. All of you."

Behind her, the train hums electric, waiting.

()

_Fin._


End file.
